Dilbert’s Bizarre Live-Action TV Pilot Is Unwatchable Today

For decades, “Dilbert” was one of the most popular comic strips in the United States. Created by Scott Adams, who died today (January 13, 2026) at the age of 68 from pancreatic cancer, it was a light-hearted workplace satire that captured the absurdities and unpleasantness of a boring office job. For anyone who has ever dealt with micromanaging bosses who post daily memos filled with mind-numbing corporate talk, the appeal of “Dilbert” was obvious. For a while it was totally obnoxious and sometimes amusing.

In the late 1990s, at the height of the franchise’s popularity, when “Dilbert” comic strips could be found pinned to office bulletin boards or taped to water coolers, Fox ordered a pilot for a live-action sitcom adaptation (hoping, no doubt, a television success like “The Addams Family” on ABC). Adams wrote and directed the pilot, while the network asked him to cast an actor who could have “played a (romantic) leading man” as Dilbert himself (as Adams told the Tribute to Chicago) … which is not what the character looks like in the comics. Meanwhile, Dogbert, Dilbert’s four-legged consultant, came to life thanks to an animatronic.

None of this sounds promising, so it’s no surprise that the pilot was never picked up (although UPN had better luck with its animated series “Dilbert,” which ran for 30 episodes from 1999 to 2000). And even though failed pilots are sometimes released or leaked like the magnificent “Heat Vision and Jack” by Ben Stiller, this live-action adaptation of “Dilbert” has remained firmly under lock and key. You can’t find it anywhere online, and there’s no real demand for it at the moment, except for the desire of some to relentlessly mock its likely awfulness.

But why is the “Dilbert” pilot primed for hate? Well, because Adams personally held hateful opinions and wasn’t shy about sharing them.

In the early 2000s, Adams was an outspoken political conservative, which wasn’t a big deal until he wrote a blog post in 2003 questioning the Holocaust death toll. Although he was reprimanded for this, he was anything but chastised. In 2011, he compared women to children and people with mental disabilities. Then, in 2016, he vehemently supported Donald J. Trump for president of the United States, even after the candidate’s “grab them by the b****” comment was leaked. He was also, unsurprisingly, an anti-vaxxer during the Covid pandemic. And he eventually incorporated his views into the “Dilbert” comic strip, including one in which workers’ performance ratings were replaced with “arousal scores.”

“Dilbert” remained published in national newspapers until 2023, when Adams, reacting to a Rasmussen poll that found that only a slight majority of black Americans agreed with the saying “It’s OK to be white,” called black Americans a “hate group.” He then urged white people to “get away from them.” In response, Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped the comic, forcing Adams to publish “Dilbert” as a webcomic on his own website.

So don’t expect anyone to honor Adams’ tainted memory by releasing the unaired “Dilbert” pilot, and you can probably consider which proposed the death of the live-action film “Dilbert” as well (although both seasons of the animated series are available for purchase on Prime Video). If you’re morbidly curious to get an idea of ​​how bad the pilot was, you can see the animatronic Dogbert in an episode of PBS’s “Nightmare Theater.”